Dad in-training: A snapshot of Canadian dads and families

This Canada Day, I’m hoping to spend some quality time with the family. But as I do so, I’m thinking about other Canadian dads and their families.

How representative am I of fathers in this country? We know our demographics are changing – in terms of culture, age, socio-economic status, overall population and where/how we’re living. But just what does that change look like?

Today, I thought I’d pull up a few statistics that might offer a few clues as to the profile of the modern Canadian family.

Changing roles for dads

For those of us who are fans of Mad Men, I think part of the show’s appeal is that it represents another time and place. It allows us to be a bit smug about how far we’ve come, particularly in moving towards greater gender equality and away from attitudes that essentially relegated women to domestic roles while men did whatever they wanted.

Dads are spending more time with their families: 379 minutes per day in 2010, compared to 360 minutes in 1986. 29 per cent claimed paid parental leave benefits in 2011, compared to just three per cent in 2000. And fathers with preschool children are missing more days from work for personal or family reasons, taking 6.3 days off in 2007 compared to 1.8 in 1997.

Having kids at an older age

This perhaps shouldn’t be surprising: men are becoming fathers at an older age. The average was 29.1 years old in 2006, which was up from 27.8 in 1995.

There are a number of things that could explain this shift. The most obvious would seem to be the tendency for more people to put off parenthood while they get their careers off the ground – an increasingly common trend. We’re lucky to have so much in Canada, but the cost of raising a family can be expensive. It’s particularly true if you live in a large Canadian city where real estate, child care and other expenses can be prohibitively high.

Just the cost of buying a home large enough to comfortably raise kids can mean taking out a large mortgage. And that’s not easy to do if you’re in your 20s and still trying to figure out what you want to do with your life.

Photo: Handout/AMCMad Men’s Don Draper is a dad few would want to emulate.

Increasingly multi-cultural

I’m always surprised to see the Canadian stereotype perpetuated in American media: some pale-faced hoser with a toque and a knitted sweater or hockey jersey, apologizing profusely and saying “eh” a million times. I can’t remember where I heard it, but I remember someone joke that Canadians were “like Americans, but whiter.”

They couldn’t have been more wrong. If they’d ever been here, they’d realize a large and growing proportion of Canadians come from all over the world. The stereotypical Canadian “hockey hoser” family may exist somewhere, but it’s hardly the norm.

The 2011 National Household Survey counted 6,775,800 foreign-born individuals living in Canada, 1,162,900 of whom had arrived between 2006 and 2011. Over 20 per cent of Canadians were foreign-born – the highest of all G8 countries. Visible minorities, meanwhile, comprise over 19 per cent of the Canadian population. That’s 6,264,800 people!

Single parents, common-law parents and same-sex parents

The prototypical “nuclear family” isn’t as common anymore, and the basic structure of Canadian families continues to evolve.

The divorce rate, while relatively stable since its peak in the 1970s, was 210.8 per 100,000 Canadians in 2008 compared to 37.4 in 1959. And the proportion of lone-parent families headed up by men, for instance, has steadily grown over the past three decades, to 21.5 per cent in 2011 from 17.7 per cent in 1981.

There’s considerable diversity in two-parent families as well. Married couples made up 67 per cent of all Canadian families in the 2011 census, while common-law couples made up 16.7 per cent. There were also 64,575 same-sex couple families in Canada in 2011, and 21,015 of those couples were married.

So as we sit back this Canada Day to enjoy beer on the patio, or fun in the cottage sun, fireworks, parades, barbeques and other time-honoured activities, we should be proud of all the things that make us different. And yet, at the same time, acknowledge that the fact that we’re all Canadian – that we can embrace so much diversity under that same, welcoming umbrella – is something unique and worth celebrating.